THE emancipated Jews scattered among the nations just like strangers, and, as we have seen, it could not be otherwise, since for centuries they formed a nation among the nations, a special people preserving its characteristics thanks to the strict and precise ritual, as well as owing to the legislation which kept it apart and tended to perpetuate it. As conquerors, not as guests did they come into modern societies. They were like a penned-in flock; suddenly the barriers fell and they rushed upon the field opened to them. They were not warriors, what is more, the moment was not favourable to an expedition of a small band, but they made the only conquest for which they were armed, the economic conquest for which they had been preparing for some many long years. They were a race of merchants and money-dealers, perhaps degraded by mercantile practice, but, thanks to this very practice, equipped with qualities which were becoming preponderant in the new economic system. And so it was easy for them to take to commerce and finances, and, it must be repeated, they could not act otherwise. Crowded together, oppressed for centuries, ever curbed in their soarings, they had acquired a formidable power of expansion, and this power could find application in certain channels only; their efforts were limited, but their nature was not changed, and it was not changed on the day of their liberation either, and they marched ahead on the road which was familiar to them. However, the state of affairs was particularly favourable to them. At this period of great overthrows and reconstructions, when nations were being modified, new principles established, new social, moral and metaphysical conceptions wrought out, they were the only ones to be free. They were without any attachments to those surrounding them; they had no ancient patrimony to defend, the heritage which the former society was leaving to nascent society was not theirs; the thousand ancestral ties which linked the citizens of the modern state with the past, could not influence their conduct, their intellectuality, their morality; their spirit had no shackles.

I have shown that their liberation could not change them, that a number of them regretted their past of isolation, and even if they did endeavour to remain themselves, if they did not assimilate, they marvelously adapted themselves, by the very force of their special tendencies, to the economic conditions which had affected the nations since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The French Revolution was above all an economic revolution. If it is considered as the termination of a struggle between classes, it must be viewed as the consummation of a struggle between two forms of capital, viz: real property and personal property, or landed capital, and industrial and speculative capital. With the supremacy of the nobility the supremacy of landed capital disappeared, too, and the supremacy of the bourgeoisie brought on the supremacy of industrial and speculative capital. The emancipation of the Jew is linked with the growth of the prevalence of industrial capital. So long as landed capital retained the political power, the Jew was deprived of any right; the Jew was liberated on the day when political power passed to industrial capital, and that proved fatal. The bourgeoisie needed help in the struggle it undertook; the Jew was for it a valuable ally, whom it was its interest to emancipate. Since the days of the Revolution, Jew and bourgeois marched hand in hand, together they sustained Napoleon at the moment when dictatorship became necessary to defend the privileges gained by the Third Estate, and when the imperial tyranny became too heavy and oppressive for capitalism the bourgeois and the Jew, united and preluded the fall of the Empire by forestalling provisions at the time of the Russian campaign and helped to bring about the final disaster by calling forth slumps at the exchange and buying the disloyalty of marshals.

At the beginning of the great industrial development, after 1815, when canal, mine, and insurance companies were formed, the Jews were among the most active in promoting combination of capital. Moreover, they were the most skillful, because the spirit of combination had for centuries been their only support. But they were not content to aid in bringing about in this practical way the triumph of industrialism, they gave their aid in a theoretical way, also. They gathered around Saint-Simon, the philosopher of the bourgeoisie; they worked at diffusing and developing his teaching.

Saint-Simon had said: [147] “The manufacturers must be entrusted with the administration of the temporal power,” and “the last step that remains for industry to make is to obtain the direction of the State and the chief problem of our time is to secure to industry a majority in our parliaments.” He had added : [148] “The industrial class must occupy the first rank, because it is the most important of all; because it can do without all the others, while none other can do without it; because it exists by its own forces, by its personal labours. The other classes must work for it, because they are its creatures and because it sustains their existence; in a word, as everything is made by industry, everything must be made for it.” The Jews helped to realize the Saint-Simonian dream; they proved themselves the most trustworthy allies of the bourgeoisie, inasmuch as in working for it they worked for themselves and, in all Europe, they were in the front rank of the liberal movement, which from 1815 till 1848 succeeded in establishing the domination of bourgeois capitalism.

This role of the Jews did not escape the class of landed capitalists, and we shall see that therein lay one of the causes of the anti-Judaism of the conservatives, but to the Jews it was not worth so much as the recognition of the bourgeoisie. When the latter had firmly established its power, when it became restful and secure, it discovered that its ally, the Jew, was its formidable competitor, and it reacted against it. Thus the conservative parties, made up, as a rule, of capitalist agriculturers, became anti-Jewish in their fight against industrial and speculative capitalism, represented chiefly by the Jew, and industrial and speculative capitalism became anti-Jewish in its turn, on account of Jewish competition. Anti-Judaism, which had been religious at first, became economic, or, rather, the religious causes, which had once been dominant in anti-Judaism, were subordinated to economic and social causes.

This transformation, which corresponded with the change in the role played by the Jews, was not the only one. Once a matter of sentiment, the hostility towards the Jews became one of reason. The Christians of yesterday hated the deicides instinctively, and they never attempted to justify their animosity: they showed it. The antisemites of to-day conceived a desire to explain their hatred, i.e., they wanted to dignify it: anti-Judaism moulted into antisemitism. How was this antisemitism manifested? It had no other way of expression but through the printing press. Official antisemitism was dead in the West, or it was dying; as a result anti-Jewish legislation, too, was disappearing; there remained theoretical antisemitism, it was an opinion, a theory, but the antisemites had a very distinct object in view. Up to the time of the Revolution literary anti-Judaism sustained legal anti-Judaism, since the Revolution and the emancipation of the Jews, literary antisemitism has striven to restore legal anti-Judaism in the countries where it no longer exists. It has not, as yet, achieved that, and we have to study only the manifestations of the antisemitism of the pen, manifestations, some of which represent the opinion of the many, for, if literary antisemities have supplied reasons to the unconscious antisemites, they were produced by them; they attempted to explain what the flock felt, manifested, and if they have at times ascribed strange and improbable motives, they often but echoed the sentiments of their inspirers. What were these sentiments? We shall see if we examine the antisemitic literature, and at the same time we shall disentangle the manifold causes of contemporary antisemitism.

Except in the case of some of them, it is impossible to classify the antisemitic works under too narrow categories, as each of them often presented manifold tendencies. Still they each have a dominant idea, in accordance with which their classification may be settled, always remembering that a work approaching a definite type does not belong solely and exclusively to it. We shall, then, subdivide antisemitism into Christian, Socialist, economic, ethnological and national, metaphysical, revolutionary and anti-Christian antisemitism.

Christian Socialist antisemitism was generated by the permanency of religious prejudices. If the Jews had not changed on entering into society, the sentiments felt toward them for so many long years would not have disappeared either. The Jews owed their emancipation to a philosophical movement coinciding with an economic movement and not to the abolition of secular prejudices against them. Those who thought the Christian State the only State possible looked with disfavour upon the intrusion of the Jews, and anti-Talmudism was the first manifestation of this hostility. The Talmud which was justly considered the religious stronghold of the Jews was assailed and a host of polemists devoted themselves to proving how much the teachings of the Talmud were opposed to the teachings of the Gospel. Against the book they resumed all the complaints of the controversialists of yore, those enumerated by the Jewish apostates in debates, and repeated in the thirteenth century by Raymund Martin, those raised by Pfefferkorn and later on by Eisenmenger. Not even the method or the make-up was changed; the same moulds were made use of; in writing pamphlets the same traditions were followed as those of the dominican inquisitors, and not a whit more of critical acumen was put to use in the study of the Talmudic “deep.” Nevertheless, concerning the Jew, his dogmas, his race, the Christian antisemites of our time have the same notions as the Jews of the Middle Ages had. The Jew preoccupies and haunts them, they see him everywhere, they trace everything back to him, they have the same conception of history as had Bossuet. For the bishop, Judea was the centre of the world; all events, disasters and joys, conquests and downfalls, as well as the foundings of empires had for its primary, mysterious and ineffable cause the whims of a God faithful to the Bene-Israel, and this people, wanderer, founder of kingdoms and captive, in turn, had continually directed mankind toward its only goal: the coming of Christ. Ben Hadad and Sennacherib, Cyrus and Alexander, seem to exist only because Judah exists, and because Judah must now be exalted and then humiliated, until the hour when he will enjoin upon the world the law which must come from him. But what Bossuet had conceived for the purpose of unheard of glorification, the Christian antisemites renew that with quite opposite ends in view. For them the Jewish race, the scourge of the nations, scattered over the earth, accounts for the misfortunes and blessings of the alien nations in whose midst it had settled, and the history of the Hebrews once more becomes the history of monarchies and republics. Scourged or tolerated, banished or admitted, they, by the very fact of these political vicissitudes, account for the glory of the states or even their decadence. To tell the story of Israel, is to tell the story of France, or Germany, or Spain. This is what the Christian antisemites see, and their antisemitism is thus purely theological, it is the antisemitism of the Fathers, that of Chrysostom, Saint Augustin, Saint Jerome. Before the birth of Jesus, the Jewish people was the chosen people, the beloved son of God; since the time it had disowned the Saviour, since it had become a deicide, it had become the fallen people par excellence, and having before brought the world’s salvation, it now causes its ruin.

Whatever their affinities and kinship with the anti-Jews of the Middle Ages, the anti-Talmudists, at all events, take a little different point of view. Formerly, the blasphemies against the Christian religion were chiefly sought in the Talmud, or arguments in support of the divinity of Jesus Christ were sought there; hereafter this book’s enemies hunt it especially as an anti-social, pernicious and destructive work. The Talmud, according to them, makes the Jew an enemy of all nations, but if some of them, like des Mousseaux and Chiarini are guided, like the theologians of yore, above all by the desire to bring Israel back to the bosom of the church, [149] others, like Doctor Rohling, [150] are rather inclined to suppress him and they declare him forever incapable to be of any good. Quite the contrary; since, they say, not only are his teachings incompatible with the principles of Christian governments, but because he even seeks to ruin these governments in order to draw profit therefrom.

It is easy to understand that after the upsettings caused by the French Revolution, the conservatives felt called upon to hold the Jews responsible for the destruction of the ancient regime. When they cast a glance around them after the storm had passed away, one of the things that must have given them the greatest surprise, was surely the position of the Jew. But yesterday the Jew was nothing, he had no right, no power, and now he was shining in the front rank; not only was he rich, but he could even be a doctor and govern the land, as he paid his tax. Him particularly did the social change favour. Accordingly, the Christian antisemites did not stop at being incensed at the Jews’ speculations over national property or the military supply, but applied to them the old juridical saying: fecisti qui prodes (“those hast done it who profitest thereby.”) If the Jew indeed had profited by the Revolution in this respect, if he had derived from it so great a benefit, it means that he had prepared them, or rather, to say, he had helped along with all his forces.

Nevertheless it was necessary to explain how this despised and hated Jew, considered a thing, had obtained the power of accomplishing such deeds, how he had prepared so formidable a might. Here comes in a theory, or rather a philosophy of history familiar to the Catholic polemists. According to these historians, the French Revolution whose counter blow has been universal, and which has transformed the institutions of Western Europe, was but the capping of a secular conspiracy. Those who attribute it to the philosophical movement of the eighteenth century, to the excesses of monarchical governments, to a fatal economic change, to the decrepitude of a class, the enfeeblement of a form of capital, to the inevitable evolution of the ideas of authority and State, to the enlargement of the idea of an individualall those are grievously in error, according to the historians I am speaking about. They are blind people who do not see the truth: the Revolution was the work of one or several sects, whose establishment goes back to great antiquity, sects brought out by the same desire and the same principle: the desire for domination and the principle of destruction.

The Genesis of this conception of history is easy to find. It took its origin under the Terror itself. The part taken by the Masonic lodges, by the Illumines, the Red-Crosses, the Martinists, etc., in the Revolution, had vividly struck certain minds which were carried away to exaggerate the influence and role of these societies. A thing which particularly astonished these superficial observers, was the international character of the Revolution of 1789 and the simultaneousness of the movements it called forth. They contrasted its general effect with the local effect of the previous Revolutions, which had agitated, as, e.g., in England, only the countries where they took place, and, in order to account for this difference they attributed the work of centuries to a European association with representatives in the midst of all nations, rather than to admit that the same stage of civilization and similar intellectual, social, moral and economic causes, could have simultaneously produced the same effects. The very members of these lodges, of these societies, helped in spreading this belief. [151] They, too, exaggerated their importance, they not only asserted to have worked, during the eighteenth century, for the changes then in the process of preparationwhich was truebut they even claimed to have been their distant initiators. This, however, is not the place to debate this question; suffice it to have stated the existence of these theories: we are going to show how they came to the assistance of the Christian antisemites.

The first writers to set forth these ideas confined themselves to stating the existence of “a peculiar nation which was born and had grown in darkness, amidst all civilized nations, for the purpose of subjecting all of them to its rule,” [152] as, e.g., the cavalier de Malet, brother of the conspiring general, wanted to prove in a book, little-known and very poor at that. Men like P. Barruel, in his Memoirs on Jacobinism,[153] like Eckert in his works on Free Masonry, [154] like Dom Deschamps, [155] like Claudio Jannet, like Cretineau Joly, [156] have developed and systematized this theory, they have even endeavoured to prove its reality and though they did not attain their aim, they have at least gathered all the elements necessary to undertake so curious a history as that of secret societies. In all their works, they were led to examine what had been the position of the Jews in these groups and sects, and, struck by the analogies presented by the mystagogic rites of Masonry as compared with certain Judaic and Kabbalistic traditions, [157] misled by the Hebrew pomp which characterizes the initiation in these lodges, they arrived at the conclusion that the Jews had always been the inspirers, guides and masters of Free Masonry, nay, more than that, they had been its founders, and that they, with its aid, persistently aimed at the destruction of the church, from the very time of its foundation.

They went further in this path, they wanted to prove that the Jews had preserved their national constitution, that they were still ruled by princes, the Nassi, who led them to the conquest of the world, and that these enemies of mankind possessed a formidable organization and tactics. Gougenot des Mousseaux, [158] Rupert, [159] de Saint Andre, [160] the abbot Chabeauty, [161] have supported these assertions. As for Edouard Drumont, the whole pseudo-historic portion of his books, when not borrowed from father Loriquet, is nothing but a clumsy and uncritical plagiarism of Barruel, Gougenot, of Dom Deschamps and Cretineau Joly. [162]

Whatever the case may be, with Drumont, as with pastor Stoecker, Christian antisemitism transforms or rather it borrows new weapons from several sociologists. Though Drumont fights the Jew’s anti-clericalism, though Stoecker, in his anxiety to win the name of a second Luther, rises against the Jewish religion as destructive of the Christian State, other preoccupations engage them; they attack Jewish wealth and attribute to Jews the economic transformation which is the work of the l9th century. They still persecute in the Jew, the enemy of Jesus, the murderer of a God, but they aim particularly at the financier, and therein they join hands with those who preach economic antisemitism.

This antisemitism has manifested itself since the beginning of Jewish financiering and industrialism. If we find only traces of it in Fourier [163] and Proudhon, who confined themselves to stating only the role of the Jew as middle-man, stockjobber and nonproducer, [164] it gave life to men like Toussenel [165] and Capefigue [166] ; it inspired such books as The Jews Kings of the Epoch and the History of Great Financial Operations; and later on, in Germany, the pamphlets of Otto Glagau against the Jewish bankers and brokers. [167] However, I have already pointed out the origin of this antisemitism, how, on the one hand, the landed capitalists held the Jew accountable for the predominance of industrial and financial capitalism, so hateful to them, how, on the other hand, the bourgeoisie, stocked with privileges, turned against the Jew, its erstwhile ally, henceforth its competitor and a foreign competitor at that; for to his position as a non-assimilated stranger the Jew owes the excessive animosity shown him, and thus economic antisemitism is bound up with ethnologic and national antisemitism.

This last form of antisemitism is modern, it was born in Germany, and from the Germans the French antisemites have derived their theory.

This doctrine of races, which Renan advocated in France [168] was wrought out in Germany under the influence of the Hegelian doctrines. It gained the ascendancy in 1840 and particularly in 1848, not only because German policy pressed it into service, but because it was in accord with the nationalist and patriotic movement that produced nations, and with that striving for unity which characterized all European nations.

The state, so they said, must be national; the nation must be one, and must include all the individuals speaking the national language and belonging to the same race. More than that, it is of importance that this national State reduce all the heterogeneous elements, i.e., the foreigners. For the Jew, not being an Aryan, has not the same moral, social and intellectual conceptions as the Aryan; he is irreducible, and therefore he must be eliminated, or else he will ruin the nations that have received him, and some among the nationalist and ethnologic antisemites assert that the work has already been accomplished.

These notions, resumed since then by von Treitschke [169] and Adolph Wagner in Germany, by Schoenerer in Austria, Pattai in Hungary and, at a much later date, by Drumont in France, [170] were reduced, for the first time, to a system by W. Marr, in a pamphlet which had a certain echo in France: The Victory of Judaism over Germanism. [171] . In it Marr declared Germany the prey of a conquering race, the Jews, a race possessing everything and wanting to Judaize Germany, like France, however, and he concluded by saying that Germany was lost. To his ethnologic antisemitism he even admixed the metaphysical antisemitism which, if I may say so, Schopenhauer had professed, [172] the antisemitism consisting in combating the optimism of the Jewish religion, an optimism which Schopenhauer found low and degrading, and with which he contrasted Greek and Hindu religious conceptions.

But Schopenhauer and Marr are not the only representatives of philosophical antisemitism. The whole of German metaphysics combated the Jewish spirit, which it considered essentially different from the Germanic spirit, and which for it stood for the past as contrasted with the present. While the Spirit is realized in the world’s history, while it advances, the Jews remain at a lower stage. Such is the Hegelian thought, that of Hegel and also of his disciples of the extreme leftFeuerbach, Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer. [173] Max Stirner [174] developed these ideas with much precision. To his mind, universal history has until now passed through two ages: the first, represented by antiquity, during which we had to work out and eliminate “the negro stage of the soul;” the second, that of Mongolism, represented by the Christian period. During the first age man depended upon things, during the second he is swayed by ideas, waiting until he can dominate them and free himself. But the Jews, these precociously wise children of antiquity, have not passed out of this negro stage of the soul. In Duhring we find another more ethical than metaphysical form of philosophical antisemitism. In several treatises, pamphlets and books, [175] Duhring assails the Semitic spirit and the Semitic conception of the divine and of ethics, which he contrasts with the conception of the Northern peoples. Pushing the deductions from his premises to their logical end and still following up Bruno Bauer’s doctrine, he assails Christianity which is the last manifestation of the Semitic spirit: “Christianity,” says he, “has above all no practical morality such as is not capable of ambiguous interpretation and thus might be available and sane. The nations will, therefore, not be done with the Semitic spirit until they have expelled from their spirit this present second aspect of Hebraism.”

After Duhring, Nietzsche,[176] in his turn, combated Jewish and Christian ethics, which, according to him, are the ethics of slaves as contrasted with the ethics of masters. Through the prophets and Jesus, the Jews and the Christians have set up low and noxious conceptions which consist in the deification of the weak, the humble, the wretched, and sacrificing to it the strong, the proud, the mighty.

Several revolutionary atheists, Gustave Tridon [177] and Regnard [178] among them, have espoused, in France, this Christian antisemitism which, in its final analysis, is reduced to the ethnologic antisemitism, just like the strictly metaphysical antisemitism.

The different varieties of antisemitism may, then, be reduced to three: Christian antisemitism, economic antisemitism, and ethnological antisemitism. In our examination just made we have pointed out that the grievances of the antisemites were religious grievances, social grievances, ethnologic grievances, national grievances, intellectual and moral grievances. To the antisemite the Jew is an individual of a foreign race, incapable of adapting himself, hostile to Christian civilization and religion; immoral, antisocial, of an intellectuality different from the Aryan intellectuality, and, to cap it all, a depredator and wrongdoer.

We shall now examine these grievances in regular order. We shall see whether they are well-founded, i.e., whether the real causes of contemporary antisemitism correspond to them, or whether they are but prejudices. Let us first turn to the study of the ethnologic grievance.

Footnotes

149. The anxiety for the future role of the Jews is expressed in a striking book by Leon Bloy, Le Salut par les Juits (Paris, 1892). In the volume of documents and notes written as a sequel to Dom Deschamps’ work on Secret Societies, Claudio Jannet expresses the opinion that the Jews are undoubtedly destined to lead the world back to God. This is exactly the ancient theological belief.

157. On the Hebrew traditions in Free-Masonry, and on the points of similarity between the Free-Masons and the ancient Essenians, cf. Clavel, Histoire pittoresque de la Franc-Maconnerie (Paris, 1843); Kauffmann et Cherpin, Histoire philosophique de la Franc-Maconnerie (Lyons, 1856) and an artitle by Moise Schwab on the Jews and the Free-Masons, published in the Annuaire des Archives israelites pour l’an 5650 (1889-1890). Consult also the various works of J. M. Ragon on Free-Masonry (Paris, Dentu).

162. It must be noted that in his France Juive (I mean in its first chapters) Drumont does not quote Gougenot des Mousseau or Barruel even once; he quotes, in passing, Dom Deschamps three times and Cretineau de Joly’s Vendee Militaire once, and yet he laid these writers under heavy contribution. Unless his “historical documents” had been furnished to him by the disciples of those I have just mentioned – that is quite possible. Let it be understood here, that this refers to Drumont as historian and not as polemist.

164. In Karl Marx (Annales franco-allemandes, 1844, p. 211) and in Lassalle, the same estimates of the parasite Jew may be found as in Fourier and Proudhon .

165. Toussenel, Les Juits rois de l’Epoque (Paris, 1847). Toussenel followed up this book with a violent campaign in the newspaper, La Democratie pacifique. However, the antisemitic movement was quite violent, under the July monarchy, and numerous pamphlets were published against the Jewish financiers.

168. During the last years of his life Renan had given up his theory of races, their inequality and their mutual superiority or inferiority. These theories will be found set forth quite clearly and lucidly in Gobineau’s in many ways remarkable book, L’inegalite des races (Paris, Firmin Didot, 1884).

170. Drumont is the type of the assimilator antisemite who has flourished in France these last years, and who has overrun Germany. A talented polemist, vigorous journalist and sprightly satirist, Drumont is a historian of poor documentary evidence, a mediocre sociologist and especially philosopher, and can under no circumstances be compared with men of H. von Treitschke’s, Adolph Wagner’s and Eugen Duhring’s standing. Yet, in the development of antisemitism in France and Germany even he has played a considerable role, and he has exercised a great influence as a propagandist.

172. “A God like that Jehovah,” says Schopenhauer, “who, as animi causa, for its own pleasure and from the joy of heart produces this world of misery and lamentations, and who even glories in it – this is too much. Let us then, at this point, consider the religion of the Jews as the last among the religious doctrines of the civilized nations, and this will be in perfect accord with the fact that it is the only one that has absolutely not a trace of immortality.” (Parerga und Paralipomena, v. II, ch. XII, p. 312, Leipzig 1874).

173. We shall return to this question in our Economic History of the Jews, when speaking of the role of the Jews in Germany in the nineteenth century. – Cf. Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts; Arnold Ruge, Zwei Jahre in Paris; Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage; L. Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christenthums.